On one hand, the two candidates are locked in a dead heat among Ohioans who have not yet voted but who say they intend to, with 45% of respondents supporting the President and 45% preferring his Republican challenger.

But Obama has clearly received a boost from Ohio’s early voting period, which began on Oct. 2 and runs through November 5. Among respondents who say they have already voted, Obama holds a two-to-one lead over Romney, 60% to 30%.

When those two groups are combined, the TIME poll reveals, Obama leads by five points overall in Ohio.

“At least for the early vote, the Obama ground game seems to be working,” says Mark Schulman, president of Abt SRBI, which conducted the poll.

Nearly one third of all Ohioans voted early in 2008.

(Emphasis added.) Romney's losing ground with every day. If he doesn't pick up three or four points or even more starting now, not just on Election Day, then he loses Ohio (assuming the poll's right, of course). Nate Silver says the candidate who wins Ohio wins the election in 95% of his simulations. If Romney loses Ohio, he then needs to win Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Virginia.

Keep talking up that momentum Mitt, but you're losing the race as long as the Democrats do a good ground game on turnout, or someone springs an October surprise.

UPDATE: I forgot to add the obvious that Ohio is car-manufacturing oriented, and the less-obvious that it's 82% dependent on coal. This might help explain, although not excuse, Obama's climate silence.

47 comments:

Romney went to Reno NV today (Wednesday 10/24). Guess who wasn't there in Reno today? Republican Governor Brian Sandoval, who found a reason to be in Canada. Who was in Reno? Pete Arnault, Sandoval strategist and confidante, who gave an interview to the media saying that Obama would likely win Nevada.

The Democrats have built up a pretty big registration edge in Nevada. Yesterday, at a Obama rally at UNLV, actress Eva Longoria (famous for playing Desperate Housewife Gabrielle Solis) urged UNLV students to support Obama. By the way, Longoria is divorced from NBA player Tony Parker, and just broke up with Jets QB Mark Sanchez.

Students, I hope you are paying attention to this celebrity gossip because it will be on the exam!

Obama serves many useful purposes for the elites. He attracts hatred from male whites (and female whites) which spurs them to greater racism, which, in turn, causes greater divisiveness in middle-class society.

He keeps middle-class blacks and other middle-class people of color quieter while the elites strip them of what modest wealth they have managed to accumulate.

He has done the bidding of Wall Street and the Pentagon to a tee.

He is able to accomplish awful things (such as continuing the Patriot Act and Bush's torture program, enacting Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), launching drone attacks on all sorts of innocent brown people, conducting vicious attacks on whistleblowers etc etc) that a Republican would be hard pressed to accomplish. If Obama were a Republican, the Left would take up arms against him for these blatant acts of fascism. Instead, they give Obama a pass just because he is a Democrat, and especially because he is a minority.

I think from a DESIRED RESULTS perspective, Obama is the guy for TPTB.

Now folks, just let me be clearYou really have nothing to fearI've heard all the groansAbout building those dronesWhat's that? I can no longer hear!

"Agamemnon, review your chart and you'll see the main problem is interest on debt, not entitlements. "

Right. Stop paying interest and see what happens.

But you're not looking very closely.

The MAXimum we ( US federal government ) ever taxed was 21% of GDP ( during WWII, with really high rates at ALL income levels ). The average, as depicted on the chart, is about 18% of GDP. Entitlement and discretionary spending will reach 37% of GDP within a generation.

Now, some nations do tax a higher level. But there are two big problems with counting on that:

1. State and local taxation is facing a huge burden with retirement plans ( like Eli's and mine ).

2. Greece thought they could just get more revenue also, but the higher the rates go, the larger the motivation and the propensity to avoid taxes.

Most of the failing Euros are not choosing 'austerity' but rather, the bind markets are imposing austerity because they have exceeded their ability to pay.

"Right now the rates on 10 20 and 30 year T bills are 1.86% 2.60% 2.98%. That is less than inflation. Now is an excellent time for the US to borrow almost without limit."

I'm pretty sure that's how the Greeks felt before rates started rising.

The issue is not so much the current situation but the fact that Boomers have started to retire proportionately fewer Xs, Ys, and millenials are taxable to pay the bills.

Further, through out the postwar boom, employed percentage of population was rising. Now, we don't have have to rely only productivity gains, it means maximum GDP growth will be lower ~ 2% ( the 'new normal' ).

Back to the topic (forgive me), but I find it curious that the early voting is going 2:1 for Obama. Can't think of an obvious reason why O's supporters vote earlier than R's. Of course if they do, that subtracts O's votes from the remaining pool. Question is, how did early voting trend in 2008?

The word, of course, derives from belief.Investors either believe they will be paid back or they don't, so, there is a 'tipping point'.

Debt is not a problem all the way up to the point where belief flips at which point it's a huge problem,and as Greece is discovering, not one you can just back away from.

Unlike Greece, ...the US can devalue its own currency to help remain competitive ( which we are doing )...the US has a history of paying its debts ( though not with the persistent levels that are likely )...the US will likely maintain some population growth from immigration

But like Greece, pre-crisis,...the US has debt to GDP ratios near 100%...the US is a net importer, not exporter...the US has an aging population, and increasing dependency ratio...the US has a lower theoretical upper limit to economic growth

The US has had many historical advantages but it is foolish to believethat somehow economic forces don't apply to us.

It’s amazing how right wing working class people stretch their necks for the chopping block. We’re fighting two wars and giving large tax breaks that mostly go to the one percent by offsetting those costs by taking money out of our Social Security Trust Fund. The one percent win in every way, they make big bucks supplying the accoutrements of war. Their children never have to in those wars they profit from and they don’t have to pay a dime for fighting them. And after all this, right wing working class people are happy to see their Social Security benefits cut while their Medicare benefits to decline over the next decade.

Re the question about early voting ratio: Ds are younger and more likely to vote early (older voters have the pattern they don't want to change). Ds also generally have a better ground game and early voting is what you do with your ground game in order to lock in your vote.

So unfortunately the Ds need to run up the score as much as possible in the early vote game. Still, leading on the early vote is better than being behind.

I have seen other estimates that also try to include "saved interest" payments over ten years, but if the money is just spent on something else, well. The highest estimate I have ever seen is $95 billion a year which includes fictional interest savings.

Anon@2:36Errors on a binomial distribution don't work that way--there is only one parameter to the distribution--P, the proportion who are voting for candidate X--the rest (1-P) being assumed to be voting for his opponent.

"Reverting the Bush tax cuts on those that make $250 more (family) $200k (individual) only adds $70 billion a year in revenue.

You are still $1 trillion short on balancing a single yearss deficit.

Math is hard for liberals."

Anon has made the fatal error of assuming that the only tax breaks the previous anon was referring to were the Bush tax cuts.

There are, of course, many other tax breaks which are mostly taken advantage of by wealthier individuals, such as the lowered tax rate on long-term capital gains. Those in the top tax bracket get the largest tax break in this case.

Sure tax the rich at 100% and you can balance the budget one year. Well the years after that you'll be in trouble.

So who, other than you, has proposed to raise the long term capital gains rate?

How much revenue are you predicting to receive from that? Go visit irs.gov and look at the latest numbers, they do list income from capital gains taxes. Nah you like bumper sticker phrases more than numbers.

Now, let’s go back to our original question: Should you trust the results of a poll? Well, let’s return to our imaginary presidential poll in which candidate A received the support of 42% of the population and candidate B received the support of 46% of the population, with a margin of error of ±3%. This means that candidate A could have up to 45% of the support and candidate B could have as little as 43% of the support, so that while the poll seems to indicate a 46% to 42% lead for candidate B, it cannot actually be used to determine who is really leading—no matter how many times pundits claim otherwise—since the margin of error is too big.

If, however, the margin of error were smaller—something like ±1.5% instead of ±3% could be achieved by polling a significantly larger sample of the population—then candidate B’s 4% lead would actually be significant since (with 95% confidence) candidate B would have a minimum of 44.5% of the vote to the maximum 43.5% support of candidate A. The general rule of thumb is that the lead must be at least twice the margin of error to be significant, and the quick and dirty tip is therefore to be sure and pay attention to margins of error—without them, poll results are essentially meaningless.//end quote

In the case of Romney/Obama Time poll, twice the margin of error is 6% (ie, larger than the 5 point difference between 49 and 44), which means there is overlap between the 95% CI's.

I agree that the overlap of the two 95% confidence intervals (for Obama and Romney) in this case is small, but it is not nonzero, which it would have to be for one to conclude (again, by the normal statistical standard) that Obama is "leading".

For any who don't believe Jason Marshall, the basic concept is also explained at here

Use of the "2X margin of error of sample" rule (eg given by Jason Marshall) for testing whether a lead is significant at the 95% confidence level is warranted when the two main candidates in a race together receive the vast majority of the polling votes (as they did in the above Time poll)

On the other hand, if one uses the standard equation for the "margin of error" for the sample (also given at the above link) , one gets 0.035 = 3.5% which is actually slightly bigger than the "3% margin of error" claimed in the article describing the time poll. the article may have rounded down (for some reason).

At any rate, using the "2X margin of error" rule with this value gives about 7%, which is just slightly bigger than the 6.7% result obtained with the more accurate equation. So, it only makes a small difference in this case

And actually, both values (7% and 6.7%) are even larger than the 6% (2X 3% margin of error) I used above to test whether Obama's lead was significant at 95% level.

If one uses 6.7% as the 95% confidence interval for the difference between the two candidate percentages, it actually makes the claim of a "significant lead" (with 49% vs 44%) even less warranted (though just slightly).

~@:>////////

By the way, the reference at the link above contains the following text that refers to the "2X margin of error" rule (which as I indicated, while not strictly true in this case, is very close:"In horse-race polls, we want to know the difference in proportions supporting the top two candidates (and perhaps between other pairs) and we need the confidence intervalfor this difference to tell if the lead is statistically significant (or “outside the marginof error”). Often pollsters, journalists and political scientists calculate this as twice the reported margin of error of the poll. This is done following the logic that if one candidateis at 55% and the other at 45% and the poll has a ±5% margin of error, then the first candidate could be as low as 55−5 = 50% and the second could be as high as 45+5 = 50%.In this case reporters would say the race was a statistical dead heat because the gap between the candidates (55 − 45 = 10%) is not more than two times the margin of error of the poll (5%). While this is the correct conclusion when there are only two possiblesurvey responses, it is not correct when there are more than two possible responses,which is in fact virtually always the case. How much difference this makes depends on how many responses are outside the two categories of interest."

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they occasionally heed his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.